Skip to main content

View Post [edit]

Poster: dunno Date: Jun 11, 2005 7:45am
Forum: petabox Subject: Re: about 400TB of this design shipped to the Archive

The move from the low power eden VIA processors to the expensive, 68.5W max TDP P4 is a bit puzzling. of the chips I would expect you to look for, a MIPS based board, or a G4 (ppc6xx?), or a mobile pentium (banias/dothan), a transmeta, or a P3... you choose instead, a desktop P4, rather 40 desktop P4's per 42U rack.

now, I suppose you were locked in to a micro-ITX board because of your custom case, but I am under the impression that socket 370, and socket 479 (P3, and Banias/dothan) boards are available for that format. perhaps they were more expensive (the banias/dothan boards), or not available with gigabit (P3?).

anyway, I can't imagine it would be easy to run a P4 2.8 in a 1U rack, much less 40 in a 42 rack, and I would imagine it would drastically increase the HVAC burden, and the kW/hr.

Reply [edit]

Poster: James Day Date: Jun 11, 2005 12:27pm
Forum: petabox Subject: Re: about 400TB of this design shipped to the Archive

I'm a Wikipedia person so I can't really comment much on that petabox CPU choice. Maybe brewster will.

On the Wikipedia side, we've recently started storying three identical copies of our old versions of article text on our P4 Apache web servers/page builders, to use their hard drives for something useful. The Petabox might have some similar processing power need or might just not have been able to get what they wanted in the available alternative options. Wikipedia hasn'yet given much thought ot kW/hr and HVAC loads, perhaps mostlybecause they are just part of the package at our current hosting place.